Re-thinking Our Approach to Scripture

"All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness…."

The phrase "inspired by God" is actually one word in the Greek, and it would translate
literally as "God-breathed." Now many people use this phrase to stress that the
Bible is true (in the sense of "inerrant"). But this
interpretation misses a more interesting picture.

Compare Paul's statement with Genesis 2.7:

"Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."

I checked four different translations of this, and
they all used the word "breathed" for the verb.
Therefore, Paul's description of the scriptures calls
to mind God's life-giving breath. The Bible may be
true, but more importantly, it's living!

We can do something similar with Paul's word
"profitable." The Greek word here has the definitions
"helping, useful, serviceable, profitable,
advantageous, [and] beneficial." Notice what
definition is missing? "True." Why wouldn't Paul use
the chance to call the scriptures true? Again, Paul
gives us something much more important than truth.

Think of it this way: If I tell you that the
Encyclopedia Britannica is true, what practical
implications does that have for you? It means that
should you need to look something up in the
Encyclopedia, you know you can trust it. By calling it
true, I have merely affirmed the Encyclopedia's value
as a reference work. But if I tell you it is
profitable, I have laid an implied obligation on you,
namely, that if you're wise, you'll study it from
cover to cover.

The same is true for the Bible: if it's merely true,
it's a good reference source (and most of us already
treat it that way). But if it's profitable, then it
behooves us to study it - ALL of it. Not just our
favorite passages from Ephesians and Psalms, the ones
we've underlined so many times that the pages are torn
through, but also books like Lamentations and Nahum
and 2 Kings. And since the scriptures for the early
church were the Hebrew texts, if we want to understand
what Jesus, Paul, Peter and John were teaching, we
need to know the full Hebraic tradition.

So Paul gives us a wonderful verse about scripture
without actually calling it true. Why? Because the
Bible is much better than merely true: it gives life
and is profitable. The phone book is true, but that
doesn't mean I should memorize it.

My point with this analysis is to show that our
discussions and arguments about the inerrancy of the
Bible too often miss the point. The problem of truth
is OUR problem, not a biblical one. And when we focus
on the questions of truth and inerrancy, we are using
our values to interpret the texts, rather than
allowing the texts to teach us what truth really is.

We do the same thing with the notion of inspiration.
Many of us hold a view of inspiration that is more
aligned with modern Western ideas of authorship: one
author writing down what comes into his mind. When
scholars suggest that the texts have been edited or
that they represent oral traditions, many of us get
wary. But there is no reason to think that God can't
inspire a group of editors, or that the church
community cannot pass down oral traditions with the
same validity as they can preserve written texts.
Again, what is really at stake here is not the
authority of the text, but rather our notions of
authority, inspiration and truth.

We in the queer Christian community - LGBTQ and
Allies - fall into this trap all too often. When we
begin to reconcile our faith with our sexuality, we
are tempted to reinterpret everything we've ever been
taught about the Bible. And that's good. But we're
also tempted to throw out anything we disagree with.
And that's not good. We need to take these texts
seriously and give them full authority, even when we
do not like what they are saying.

Yet it is possible to read the Bible fairly literally
without finding any condemnation of homosexual
relationships. How is that? Well, for starters, any
book that offers no condemnation of lesbianism (yes,
that includes Romans) cannot be said to be both
anti-gay and fully inspired by God. Let's look at the
options. Either:

1) God didn't know about lesbianism, which is doubtful.

2) God doesn't mind lesbians but hates gay men, which is also doubtful.

3) God hates lesbians as well but didn't feel the need to express
that explicitly, which means that the Bible does not contain the full
revelation from God.

4) God does not hate homosexuals and we have misunderstood the passages
that seem to condemn us.

For conservative inerrantists, the first three options
create all sorts of problems, leaving only the
fourth option as viable. In short: If the Bible is
anti-gay, then it is not fully inspired; but if it is
fully inspired, then it cannot be anti-gay.

The reality is that the Word of God is not the Bible,
but Jesus. The Bible is the revelation of that Word,
and becomes a word of God insofar as it points us to
Jesus. Thus, our correct attitude is found in the
adage,

"I do not believe in Jesus because of the Bible; I believe in the
Bible because of Jesus."

Once we start looking at the Bible in terms of Jesus,
we see God's love and liberation everywhere. We see
the freedom God gives us to work for the preservation
of the world. We see the flexibility with which God
and God's servants respond to every different
challenge and opportunity. The Bible no longer becomes
something we have to wrestle, but something we long to
internalize, something that can transform us in the
deepest regions of our soul.

The problem for us as queer Christians isn't the
Bible. It's all the stupid doctrines about the Bible
we've been told. The Bible can still be authoritative
in our lives without condemning us. What we need is to
readjust the way we understand its purpose,
usefulness, and inspiration. The Bible is much, MUCH
better than merely "true"!